


The Ground Beneath Her Feet

by Prochytes



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-09
Updated: 2015-04-09
Packaged: 2018-03-22 02:05:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3710824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prochytes/pseuds/Prochytes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Towards an (un)natural history of earthquakes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ground Beneath Her Feet

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for _Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D_ to 2x12: “Who You Really Are”. Originally posted on LJ in 2015. This revised version is indebted to Liriselei for some valuable suggestions.

The thing about earthquakes is that they’re hard to miss. 

Though not the earliest on record ( _The Bamboo Annals_ recount the perturbation of Mount Tai, in the seventh year of King Fa, under the Xia Dynasty), the earthquakes of ancient Greece and Anatolia, which are well-attested, arrest the historian’s attention. One thinks of the Koan disturbance of 412/11 BCE – the worst, so it was said, in living memory. A single night in 17 CE took twelve storied cities from Lydia. And then there was the quake that delivered Delphi from assault at the height of the Persian Wars, bringing down the peaks of Parnassus upon the foe. The interlopers stumbled in retreat, blinking beneath a pale, fleshy sky, peeled on a sudden of its mountain rind. 

Thucydides the Athenian, promoting his history of the Peloponnesian War, reserves a special place for that conflict’s earthquakes, without precedent (so he avers) in extent and violence. A troubling claim. It seems to suggest that Thucydides saw some causal connexion between the intensity of human struggle and the tumult of the earth. Perhaps he was not as rational as his successors have liked to suppose.

Or perhaps the world was strange long before we noticed.

***

Whilom County, in Virginia, patient beneath its burden of heat and hay, warmed readily to the Southern sun, but not to strangers. It was hard for the folk to seek help in their affliction. But the Government sent people, all the same. 

One was an older man in a fancy suit. He listened gravely to the count of woes: the brook that ran backwards at the full of the moon; lights glimpsed from afar in the darkling woods; livestock lost and not found, or partly found. The other was a pretty girl, with a hippy name. Her gaze stayed fixed on a lap-top screen. 

The pair from the Government did not tarry long. Before they left Whilom County, the troubles had ceased. The pair explained that it had all been down to geothermal build-up. This had been resolved, they said, by the inevitable tremor which had followed, and which they had been sent to investigate from D. C.. 

All agreed that the advance of science was an impressive thing. Particularly (and this was an addition _sotto voce_ , as a banged-up Ford carried their visitors away) when it came to the matter of predictions. The two had arrived in Whilom County a day and a half before the earthquake hit.

***

The case of Poseidon is, perhaps, instructive.

An elusive figure, significant in cult, but over-shadowed, for us, by his – literally – higher-profile contemporaries (Jove in the clouds had _his_ inhuman birth). Poseidon’s nature glitters fitfully down the centuries in the epithets which the poets bestowed upon him. 

For Pindar, he was _baruktopos_ , the loud-thunderer, and _aglaotriaina_ , lord of the bright trident. For Homer, the father of Polyphemus – loving and vengeful parent of abomination – was _kuanokhaites_ , the dark-haired one, but also, and equally often, _ennosigaios_. 

Earth-shaker.

The heroes of Homer show a healthy respect for the power of the ground on which they tread. A common oath amongst them, at the imagined advent of crushing shame, is this: _Then may the broad earth gape for me_. Helen, seeking her brothers from the battlements of Troy, fails to find them in the Argive host, for the life-giving earth has long since claimed them.

***

In the end, of course, the great wars came, as great wars will. Civil Wars, Infinity Wars… it was not always easy to tell the difference. To the untrained eye, every gun looks very much like every other, if one happens to be gazing down its barrel.

In the wars, there was a pattern that repeated. There would be a settlement of innocents, ripe for rapine, stationed on a tempting, unguarded plain. The marauders would have got wise to it, eventually, if any of their number had ever been left to tell the tale. 

The marauders would advance across the plain. Then, the land itself would turn against them. The ground would break out into a knowing leer, and, by then, it would be too late.

When it was over, there would be nothing left but stone, and silence, and the dark-haired woman. She would look at what she had done, and walk away. 

***

The Lisbon earthquake, of 1755.

After the initial disturbance, onlookers saw that the waves had retreated from the harbour. Drowned timbers shivered in the unaccustomed air. The waters rallied, tipped with scourging foam. It killed thirty thousand men, women, and children, on All Saints’ Day.

In Voltaire’s _Candide_ , the philosopher Pangloss is present when the earthquake hits. _Things cannot be otherwise_ , he says. _All this is for the best. If there is a volcano in Lisbon, it cannot be elsewhere. It is impossible for things to be other than as they are. All is well._

A man made dust by Terrigen read those lines as a boy, in an ASE inherited from his grandfather. 

***

It was a good cross, hard and accurate. Raina stumbled back a couple of feet, and grinned.

“Did you think that you could still take me with a single head-shot? Come now, Skye.” She padded forward, hands balling again into fists. “We’re not little girls anymore. And you’re getting weaker by the second.”

Too tired and groggy to rebut that. So much blood lost to those spiny punches. Terrigenesis had left Raina fast and strong. Every thorn has its rose. 

“We both know that you could end this in a heart-beat.” Raina’s smile widened. “How much is it costing you to hold it in? Let it rip. Kill us all. Terrigenesis gifted you with the voice of God. And guess what, Skye? All God does is howl.”

Take a breath. Find the strength. 

“Strike you down with all my hatred? Nice try, Raina.” Guard back up, feet following the dance that May had taught her. “But you need to work a bit on your Palpatine.”

***

One more story, which was never true.

The lords of Asgard (in what time they could spare, no doubt, from mislaying Infinity Stones and chasing Kree) exacted requital from Loki for his crimes. To a certain cave they took him, where they bound him in the entrails of his own son. Skaði set a serpent above his head, to drip venom forever on his face, but Loki’s wife, Sigyn, caught it in a cup. It is only as Sigyn turns to void the brimming cup that the venom ever lands on Loki’s face. When it does, the Laufeyson threshes in his bonds, and Midgard shakes. 

Who, in this tale, bears the guilt for the riven earth? Skaði, who set the serpent there to goad? Odin Allfather, who willed that the punishment should be so? Or Loki, who pays his debt of carnage and deceit with redoubled ruin?

One thing is clear. Whoever is responsible for making earthquakes, there is no doubt at all about who stops them. 

***

Each quiver of the world is her domain, and not just those that she stirs herself. She knows them, as a shepherd knows her flock. 

Sitting cross-legged in the gym, she makes her tally. Close at hand, the sweep and pause of May’s T’ai Chi. Farther afield, Fitz and Simmons whirl around each other in the lab, their battered saraband at last renewed. Farther yet, at the limits of her perception, Coulson’s fountain-pen taps out against his desk a languid and desultory tattoo.

 _ennosigaios_. Earth-shaker. _gaiaokhos_. Earth-sustainer.

Skye breathes, and feels the ground beneath her feet.

FINIS

**Author's Note:**

> The earthquakes mentioned in this fic are taken from Thucydides 8.41 (the Koan earthquake), Tacitus _Annals_ 2.47 (the earthquake in Lydia), Herodotus 8.37 (Delphi), and Chapter Five of Voltaire's _Candide_ (Lisbon).


End file.
